Quote of the day on GOP nihilism

...My best guess is that since they failed to make Obama a one-term president, they now intend to do what has become their custom with second-term Democratic presidents: impeach him. How to do it? Risk blowing up the entire global economy, bet on Obama caving at the end by some kind of dubious executive action, and then prosecute him for it. And what would that do exactly? It would not end Obamacare. But it would throw us instantly into both a Second Great Depression and a severe constitutional crisis. 

I simply do not see here any actual constructive strategy to help the country recover from the worst recession in decades. I see absolutely no strategy to deal with what everyone agrees is a deeply dysfunctional and grotesquely inefficient healthcare system. I see no viable way to bring down the long-term debt, because such a goal can only be achieved in our system with compromises from both parties, and the GOP is offering nothing that only the Democrats want. That’s why this is such a serious crisis, because the key driver of it has no real idea what it wants to do except destroy a re-elected president. 

This is a function of many factors the Dish has covered for years – the intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism under George W Bush; the rise of fundamentalist thinking in religion, economics and politics; the cultural marooning of the white rural poor; the substitution of a political party with a media-industrial complex that simply wants conflict for ratings and money; the collapse of anything that might be called a conservative intelligentsia able to converse with a liberal intelligentsia on common, empirical grounds; the cowardice of Republican elites in the face of their know-nothing wing, epitomized most brutally by John McCain’s selection of a delusional crazy person as his vice-presidential candidate in 2008; and the recourse to purism of an almost absurdist variety on the right – see Mark Levin’s influential view that the entire Constitution needs to be made over. 

Full post here.

--Andrew Sullivan